for everything Russian, East European, and Eurasian at Illinois

Faculty Updates on Publications and Recent Activities

Eugene M. Avrutin presented his work at Tel Aviv University, the Center for Jewish History, the University of Michigan, and the European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow. Three of his collaborative projects appeared in print: a translation and critical edition of Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia’s The Story of a Life: Memoirs of a Young Jewish Woman in the Russian Empire (with Robert H. Greene), as well as two collection of articles, Jews in the East European Borderlands: Essays in Honor of John D. Klier (with Harriet Murav) and Russia in Motion: Cultures of Mobility since 1850 (with John Randolph). He received an INTERSECT Grant from the Graduate College for a two-year interdisciplinary research project on “Cultures of Law in a Global Context.”

During academic year 2012-2013, Avrutin continues work on his new book project on ritual murder and small-town life in Velizh, supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Center for Advanced Study, and a Charles Ryskamp fellowship from the American Academy of Learned Societies.

Cynthia Buckley on September 14th presented a workshop entitled, “The Effects of Labor Migration on Societal Resilience and Stability: Insights from Eurasia,” at the 2012 Minerva Research Initiative Annual Meeting. The event convened Minerva grant awardees, senior Department of Defense personnel, and other distinguished representatives from academic professional associations and national security communities of interest to freely discuss ongoing projects and issues of interest to national security strategists. To see details please select the following link: https://community.apan.org/afosr/w/researchareas/8272.2012-osd-minerva-meeting.aspx

On October 31 Cynthia Buckley was selected by the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies to deliver a Rackham Centennial Lecture at the University of Michigan. Her talk was entitled, ” Estimating Unregistered Migration into the Russian Federation: Insights from the United States”. The Centennial Lectures showcased the diversity and quality of the intellectual legacy of the University’s graduates. Over 60 graduate programs hosted a Centennial Lecture delivered by graduate alumni in October 2012. She also provided a workshop on how to secure external funding to CREEES graduate students while on the Ann Arbor campus. You will find the event listing here: http://www.rackham.umich.edu/centennial/centennial_lectures/

November 1-4 Cynthia Buckley served as Director and Faculty Resource Scholar for a SSRC Field Development Workshop, “Crossing Boundaries: Bringing Eurasian Insights to the Study of Afghanistan”, held by the Central Asia Program of George Washington University in Washington DC. The conference brought together a select group of 12 young scholars for three intensive days of thematic discussions, professionalization seminars, project presentations, and review. In addition Cynthia Buckley along with David Abramson (U.S. Dept. of State),Sebastien Peyrouse (GWU), Marlene Laruelle (GWU), Eric McGlinchey (GMU) and Nazif Shahrani (IU) served as Faculty Resource Scholars. More information can be found at: http://www.ssrc.org/programs/pages/eurasia-program/crossing-boundaries-merging-eurasian-insights-with-the-study-of-afghanistan/

Jessica R. Greenberg has a forthcoming piece in Language and Communication. It deals with the legacies of 1989 and the Color Revolutions as models of transformative politics. The piece is entitled: Gaming the System: Semiotic Indeterminacy and Political Circulation in the New Age of Revolution

Tania Ionin in May 2012 gave an invited conference talk (based on joint work with Ora Matushansky of Utrecht University) entitled “More than one comparative in more than one Slavic language: An experimental investigation” at the 21st Meeting of the Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics conference at Indiana University. Immediately following the conference, she taught a mini-course on topics in the acquisition of Russian at the Workshop in Slavic Linguistics, also at Indiana University.

Book Cover – Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages

In October 2012, she had a conference presentation co-authored with two UIUC students (Tatiana Luchkina, Linguistics, and Anastasia Stoops, Educational Psychology) on “Quantifier scope and scrambling in the second language acquisition of Russian”, at the 5th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America, University of Kansas. Additionally, she has a book chapter that examines the use of ‘odin’ in Russian as a specificity marker that is relevant to the conference presentation at the University of Kansas. The book chapter is entitled “Pragmatic variation among specificity markers”. In C. Ebert and S. Hinterwimmer (Eds.), Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages, Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy series, Springer, pp. 75-103. The book may be found on Springer’s website: http://www.springer.com/education+%26+language/linguistics/book/978-94-007-5309-9

Book Cover – State Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire

Stefanos Katsikas published a co-edited volume entitled State-Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey: Orthodox and Muslims (1830-1945), which traces the emergence of minorities and their institutions from the late nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War, and provides a comparative study of government policies and ideologies of two states towards minority populations living within their borders. Making extensive use of new archival material, this volume transcends the tendency to compare the Greek-Orthodox in Turkey and the Muslims in Greece separately and, through a comparison of the policies of the host states and the operation of the political, religious and social institutions of minorities, demonstrates common patterns and discrepancies between the two countries that have previously received little attention.

Harriet Lisa Murav isspending the year as a Marta Sutton Weeks External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she is working on a book on David Bergelson in light of Henri Bergson.

Mark Steinberg has recently been working on a number of book chapters in edited collections (many of which he also presented as talks or conference papers): “Blood in the Air: Everyday Violence in the Experience of the Petersburg Poor, 1905-1917,” (under review), “Emotions History in Eastern Europe” (for Doing Emotions History, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press”), and “Modernity as Mask: Reality, Appearance, and Knowledge on the Petersburg Street.” He also wrote an invited blog post in May 2012 on “Picturing Putin’s Russia” for the OUPblog (http://blog.oup.com/2012/05/picturing-putins-russia/), which was re-posted at The Huffington Post as a featured article.